Down Time
by InterNutter
Summary: Moya's crew attempt to pass the time. Mayhem ensues.


Disclaimer: Farscape theirs. This mine.  
  
Achiving: If you're *sure* you want this, email cath@devil.com so I can  
bookmark Ur page :)  
  
Info: I had to wonder what would happen if the crew were starved for  
entertainment.  
  
Credits: Big thanks to all the writer of "Calvinball" :) I only borrowed  
your idea. Briefly.  
  
Down Time  
InterNutter  
  
Surprising to say, they were bored. Even *Pilot* was bored.  
Considering that he had his crew to entertain him, that was something  
of a minor miracle. Pilot waited in dissapointment for Talyn to return  
to his mother, or the Peacekeepers to apologise for their behaviour.  
Calvinball had grown stale. Rock, Paper, Scissors - after everyone  
grasped the technicalities, and ruled that adding 'Qualta Blade' or  
'Pulse Rifle' was cheating; had grown stale. The Erp game called 'tag'  
had been an abysmal failure. Everyone had decided to be 'it'.  
The problem, Pilot reasoned, was that Erp had far too many confusing  
games. Now Crichton was trying to adapt another of his peculiar  
passtimes for the rest of them. It wasn't going well, but at least it  
was something to *do*.  
"A spying game?" rumbled D'Argo.  
"A *word* game. It's only called 'I Spy' because 'spy' is another word  
for 'see'." Crichton was slumped against the table. He'd been explaining  
this for arns.  
"So why not call it 'I See', then?" Rygel said.  
"Because it doesn't rhyme with 'eye'," explained Crichton.  
Zhaan nodded. "I see."  
"No," said Chiana, who was trying to keep up. "I spy."  
Pilot, by this time, had to know. "What is the purpose of this game,  
Crichton?"  
The Erpling winced. "Well, for *kids* it teaches observation,  
spelling, rat-bastard cunning..."  
"Another children's game?" D'Argo sounded appalled. "If your people  
create so many confusing games for their children, it's a wonder they  
aren't *all* frelled in the head."  
"Maybe all this game-play wears out their brains," speculated Chiana.  
"Perhaps the Erp children are god-like geniuses and they have to confuse  
them in order to protect the universe."  
"*ANYWAY*," Crichton short-circuited another debate on Erp practices,  
since the rest of the crew didn't believe a word he said about his home.  
"For *adults*, it's a game to help the time pass on long, boring trips."  
"Aaaahhh," chorused the crew. *Now* they were getting somewhere.  
"When you're up, you pick something to spy, and it has to be something  
*everyone* can see," Crichton glared at several people who had more  
perception than the others. "And you say, 'I spy, with my little eye,  
something beginning with--' and the starting letter of the thing."  
They blinked at him.  
Crichton continued. "Like, if I was up and I spied the table, here,  
I'd say, 'I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with T'. Get  
it?"  
"What's tee?" Everyone else asked at once.  
Crichton slowly headbutted the table. "It's the name of a letter in  
the Earth alphabet."  
"Why the Erp alphabet?" demanded Chiana. "Why not the Delvian, or the  
Luxan?"  
Crichton had long since given up on correcting the mispronunciation of  
his home world. "*Because*, I'm trying to keep it simple so we can *all*  
play, Pip. I figure the Earth alphabet is so primative and retrograde  
that everyone should be able to grasp it pretty easy. There's only  
twenty-six characters, after all."  
"Twenty-*six*?" Zhaan sounded appalled.  
"Ha! They *are* retrograde," crowed Rygel.  
"Shut it, froggy. I wanna learn how to play."  
"Thank you, Pip." Crichton centred himself, and started to teach  
everyone his retrograde alphabet.  
  
~Later~  
Crichton was headbutting the table again. A sure sign that things were  
going downhill.  
"Why do you have *two* characters that make the same sound?" Aeryn  
iterated.  
"We just *do*, Aeryn," Crichton mumbled from his vantage point on the  
tabletop.  
"That makes no sense. Why have two characters for a click?"  
"Perhaps," said Pilot, "They express different *ways* to click."  
"YES!" Crichton erupted upwards. "Give the guy a fluffy toy. That's  
exactly right. The C can also make a ssss sound, like in centipede."  
"Can we play yet?"  
"So why not just use an S?"  
"Because that's not the way it's spelled."  
"Does *anyone* understand any of this?" Zhaan asked.  
"I do," said Pilot.  
"I think *I* get it," volunteered Chiana. "So what does *my* name  
start with?"  
"C," said Crichton.  
"But it's not a click or a ssss. It's a ch."  
"C's a versatile letter. You put it next to a H and you get ch."  
"The yotz with this," grumbled Rygel. "I'm more bored now than when we  
started."  
"Yeah, can we *play*, or what?"  
"Okay, okay, okay..." Crichton flailed his hand in the air. "Forget  
the alphabet. We'll stick to sounds, and proper names."  
"*Fi*nally," said Aeryn.  
"Who wants to start?"  
  
~The Next Day~  
"Hynerian does *not* start with ih," protested Chiana.  
"It does when they're like me," said Rygel. "Incredible."  
"That does it, Sparky. You cheat too much. Go into the time-out  
corner."  
"*Again*?"  
"Crichton's right, your lowness," said Aeryn. "You do cheat."  
"How can we be sure Pilot isn't also cheating?" Chiana continued. "He  
keeps *winning* all the frelling time."  
"I'd *never*..." Pilot went silent from the shock, shaking his head  
and baring his teeth.  
"Pilot's brighter than us, Pip; he doesn't need to cheat."  
"Thank you," Pilot sighed.  
"Now, Pilot, I think you were up before Sparky started cheating."  
The rest of his crew groaned.  
"Go easy on us," Crichton pleaded.  
Pilot thought. He had to make it something everyone could find. He  
opened his eyes and smiled. Yes. "I spy, with my little eye, something  
beginning with mm."  
Judging by the looks on his crew's faces, he'd got it exactly wrong.  
"Us, when we try to figure out one of your spies?" risked Chiana.  
"No," said Pilot. "That would be cheating."  
Crichton had his eyes tight shut. He was chanting, "Rat-bastard  
cunning. Rat-bastard cunning. Rat-bastard cunning," to himself.  
"Qualta-blade," said D'Argo.  
"That starts with a kwuh," said everyone.  
Except Crichton, who still muttered, "Rat-bastard cunning."  
"Majesty," said Rygel.  
"You're not playing, your cheating frogness," said Chiana.  
"...Rat-bastard cunning..."  
"Mystic," said Zhaan.  
"No," Pilot was, surprisingly, having fun with this. "Aeryn?" Maybe  
she'd get it.  
"Was it majesty?"  
"No," said Pilot, slightly mournfully. There was only one crewmember  
left with a turn.  
"Rat-bastard cunning," Crichton had his hands over his eyes. "Rat-  
bastard cunning. Rat-bastard cunning." He opened his eyes, and looked  
like he'd had a revelation from his God. "MALEVOLENT ALIENS!" He crowed.  
"No." Pilot sighed. It should have been so *easy*. Moya agreed.  
"So what was it, Pilot? What did you spy?"  
"Yeah, four-arms. What was it?"  
Pilot felt Moya's irritation and, as a direct result, was extremely  
put out. "If you can't see it, then I'm not playing any more." He turned  
off his viewer, and sent the watching DRDs off.  
  
Crichton watched all the DRDs vacate the room. "Wow. How did we piss  
him off?"  
"It must have been his spy. He purposely picked something he thought  
would be easy and none of us got it," said Aeryn.  
"He must think we think he's cheating," said Zhaan, rising from the  
table.  
"Where do you think *you're* going?" demanded Rygel.  
"I was going to comfort Pilot, of course."  
"HA! You were going to go and worm his spy out of him so you could  
feel all superior."  
"I was going to do no such thing!"  
"Give it up, Sparky," growled Crichton. "Pilot's out of sorts and it's  
*all* of our faults."  
"It was mostly D'Argo's," said Chiana. "*He* wasted his stupid guess  
on 'Qualta-blade'."  
"D'Argo *always* guesses 'Qualta-blade'," said Crichton. "Never should  
have taught you guys this stupid game."  
"It isn't your fault, John," soothed Zhaan.  
"The hell it isn't," he growled. "You guys are always coming to me  
when you need a diversion, or you want some bad-ass alien's butt kicked;  
and it's always 'retrograde Erp' this; 'retrograde Erp' that. I've had  
it with either being put down or fought over." He stood and stalked out.  
"Where are *you* going?"  
"Nowhere!"  
"Great going, your frogness," snarled Chiana. "Now he's going to  
vanish for a frelling *weeken* because of *you*."  
"If we're lucky," added Aeryn. "There was one time he frelling  
vanished for a frelling monen and a half because of his lowness."  
"John had a point," said Zhaan. "We *do* look to him for his enginuity  
and new perspective. Perhaps we should --"  
"Shut up, you blue-arsed bitch. We're all sick of your pontificating."  
"Speak for yourself, Hynerian," rumbled D'Argo.  
"Yeah. Shut up. *Fluffy*," said Chiana.  
  
Pilot was, for want of a better word, sulking. Even though he'd taken  
his DRD's out of the rec room, he could still hear his crew arguing. It  
hadn't taken long for them to get loud enough for the maintenance droids  
to hear them.  
By then, of course, the argument had devolved into who, exactly,  
should shut up. Or whose fault it was.  
He grumbled to himself and had the DRDs in that area shut off their  
hearing. His crew's bickering was only a minor irritation, compared to  
the sorrow of his beloved Moya.  
She was the one who had prodded him to use that particular 'spy', who  
thought it would be the simplest of things, and been so inadvertantly  
betrayed that their crew didn't even know they'd done it.  
"Pilot?" said Aeryn over the comm. "We're sorry we didn't get it,  
Pilot. Please. Crichton's gone missing. We need you."  
He deliberately failed to respond.  
"Pilot?" A long, long pause. "Frell..."  
Pilot may have been annoyed, but Moya was completely miserable. He had  
to stay mad, because he would weep *with* her, and start a cycle of  
misery that would be incredibly hard to break out of.  
Someone was knocking on one of his doors.  
Pilot ignored them.  
The knocking turned into a slamming of flattened hands against the  
immutable surface.  
Pilot prepared some armed DRDs in case they tried forcing the door.  
They didn't.  
He felt perversely angry about that, for some reason. So angry that he  
spoke aloud to the nothingness.  
"You really 'needed' to see me, didn't you?" he asked the mental image  
of his crew. "Had to break down the door, it was such a frelling  
emergency."  
  
~Three days later~  
"Pilot's still locked in, refusing to answer the comms. Moya's  
sluggish and unresponsive, and Crichton's *still* frelling missing,"  
Aeryn summarised. "We couldn't be any deeper in the dren unless someone  
around here has a war going on."  
"Miracle," said Chiana. "Magic."  
"Are you *still* trying to figure it out, you little yotz?" Rygel  
demanded.  
"What's it to you, toad-boy? I can if I want to."  
"I've been working with Chiana on trying to guess Pilot's spy," Zhaan  
admitted. "We thought that if we could figure it out, Pilot may be  
willing to help us. So far, we haven't come up with anything useful."  
"I'll never call Crichton an idiot again," D'Argo vowed. "It's our  
inability to reason out an Erp *children's* game that's landed us in  
this dren."  
"*I'm* calling him an idiot," said Rygel. "If that stupid yotz had  
stayed around, he'd have solved this whole mess for us. As he *should*  
have."  
"There's a flaw in your logic, your lowness," sneered Aeryn.  
The argument went rapidly downhill from there.  
  
Crichton was also going rapidly downhill. He could have sworn - if he  
wasn't busily swearing already; that he was in the upper half of Moya.  
There shouldn't have been any chutes leading downward around *here*.  
But, he'd somehow found one.  
He wedged himself against the chute walls and managed to slow his  
descent to a crawl, but he was still in danger of falling to his death.  
There was a light at the end of the tunnel. A brilliant, almost  
blinding glare. He'd seen that light before.  
As he slid closer to the terminator, he recognised it.  
It was the overhead light above Pilot's chamber.  
*WAY* above Pilot's chamber.  
"PIIIILOOOOT! HELP!"  
The distant, purple figure craned his neck and gasped. "John Crichton,  
how did you get up *there*?"  
"It's 'down' that I'm worried about, Pilot. You gotta help me!" He  
strained against the very, *very* smooth edges of the tube and finally  
managed to halt his descent. "I can't hold on like this forever!"  
  
Pilot had gone from anger to dread in less than a fifth of a microt.  
The Peacekeepers had left behind some things in the room that housed his  
underside. Those things included the hover-belt apparatus they'd used to  
lower him into position.  
His DRDs bought the equipment out in short order, and Pilot skipped  
around his more unpleasant memories in order to get the thing working.  
He sent it up.  
"Grab hold of it."  
"Waugh!" Crichton wrapped himself around the device,  
hyperventillating. "Hooray for anti-gravity..."  
A handful of microts later, when he was down on the floor, he refused  
to let go of the device. He was shaking rather violently and hissing  
between his teeth.  
"Do you need medical attention?"  
"Naw. I be fine. I just need - about an hour or so to calm the hell  
down. I be fine. I be fine." He started laughing. Then crying.  
"You're - sure you're well."  
"This," Crichton managed. "Is about normal for shock in humans. I be  
fine. After I finish throwing up." Trembling, Crichton inched his way to  
the edge of a walkway and spit into the pit below. "Gah..."  
Pilot sent a DRD to scan his vitals. "You have an elevated heart-rate,  
and far too much adrenoline in your system," he said.  
"Yah, I guessed. Nearly plunging to your death does that. Whoolp..."  
Pilot turned away and tried to close his senses to the smell of  
illness.  
"...sorry about that," Crichton said. "Fight-or-flight responses to  
all that extra adrenoline running around." He spat again. "Gah... I feel  
like crap."  
"I could inform the others of your whereabouts--"  
"NO!"  
"--if they pay attention," Pilot continued in a sullen mutter.  
"You're still mad at us, aren't you?"  
"You upset Moya," Pilot said, subliminally glad that Crichton was  
returning to what passed for normalicy. "Of *course* I'm still mad."  
"Moya," whispered the human, crawling shakily over to Pilot's console.  
He clambered upright. "It was Moya, wasn't it?"  
Moya's joy was overwhelming. The human - who was, for all intents and  
purposes, blind; had seen her. Pilot closed his eyes to revel for a  
microt in her relief.  
"Yes," he whispered.  
To his surprise, Crichton started laughing. "You," he managed.  
"Absolute. Dirty. Rat. *Bastard*!" He almost collapsed again.  
"It isn't funny," said Pilot, sliding into a far more personal  
depression. "They didn't see her."  
"Of course not. It's like seeing air. You know it's there, and you  
know you need it to live; but it's something you see and touch and feel  
every day. It's like seeing your skin. Being aware of your tongue."  
Pilot suddenly felt all of those things. It felt - strange. "I see,"  
he said eventually.  
"No, Pilot. I spy," Crichton grinned.  
Pilot opened his doors and finally turned the comms back on. "Zhaan?  
Are you there?"  
"PILOT!" The joyous chorus of his crew made Moya and him all the  
gladder.  
"What is it?" Zhaan asked over the babble of welcomes back. "What can  
we do for you?"  
"Crichton nearly took a nasty fall," Pilot said. "He may require your  
attention."  
"Nasty, hell, Pilot. That's gotta be a four storey drop. At least." He  
took a few deep breaths. "IthinkI'mgonnabesick..."  
"So, four-arms," said Chiana. "What *was* your spy?"  
  
~Fin!~ 


End file.
